Tangled Roots

it is a matter of peculiar distress to many Indian bibliophiles that most of the successful Indian books of the past few decades have not only been written in English but authored by Indians, or the children of Indians, living outside the country. Writers such as Salman Rushdie, who left India in his teens and has lived abroad for most of his adult life, and Nobel-prizewinning writer V.S. Naipaul, born in Trinidad of Indian descent, may be lauded around the globe but their reception in India is often less than warm.

Compare that with the way Indians embraced Arundhati Roy after she won the Booker Prize in 1997 with her debut novel The God of Small Things. Sure, Roy wrote in English, but she lives in New Delhi not New York and is therefore considered a worthier Indian writer — as if geographic location is the only true measure of ethnic and cultural fidelity. “Can it be true that Indian writing, that endlessly rich, complex and problematic entity, is to be represented by a handful of writers who write in English, who live in England or America and whom one might have met at a party?” wondered Indian novelist Amit Chaudhuri in the Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. Yes, wrote Rushdie in the Vintage Book of Indian Writing. “The ironic proposition that India’s best writing since independence may have been done in the language of the departed imperialists,” he said, “is simply too much for some folks to bear.”

Now come two new books about India, also written in English and from afar: one by an Indian publisher living in Canada, the other by an ethnic Indian born and raised in East Africa and also living in Canada. Interestingly, both books examine the themes of extremism and sectarian violence — curses that continue to scar India and detract from the many great gains the country has made economically in the past decade or so.

The Solitude of Emperors by David Davidar is the more straightforward of the two. Davidar’s narrator Vijay, a journalist, recounts the story of the first few years of his career working for the Indian Secularist, a tiny journal in Mumbai. After the bloody anti-Muslim riots of 1992, Vijay is sent by his editor to a mountain tea town where a religious shrine threatens to become the rallying point for another bout of violence. The novel is both artful rhetoric and page-turning thriller. Davidar, the former head of publishing giant Penguin’s India operations (and now Penguin’s top man in Canada), keeps the story rolling on even as he sketches wonderful little scenes of Indian life and explores religious zealotry and the kind of communal madness that periodically grips parts of the country.

M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song is a more complex but ultimately less satisfying examination of similar turf. The central character, Karsan, is destined to be the latest in a centuries-long familial line to inherit the Shrine of the Wanderer, an important place of Sufi worship in India’s Gujarat state. But as a young man he falls out with his father and loses his faith, escaping to North America instead. When he returns, after the riots that ripped apart Gujarat in 2002, Karsan is forced to re-examine his beliefs, his family and himself.

The longer of the two books, The Assassin’s Song jumps between the late 13th century and the past half-century, and while the technique adds some emotional heft and spiritual context to the story, it ultimately distracts from the central plot. Vassanji captures important moments in Indian history — the war with China in 1962 and the 2002 riots — in wonderful detail that links to the personal tale at the center of the novel. But the undoubtedly painstaking research can also grow too heavy and sometimes leaves one wanting more story and less history lesson.

That two novels grappling with fundamentalism in India should appear at the same time is hardly surprising: dealing with sectarianism is among India’s most pressing needs. With the country’s politicians failing to drive the debate, who can fault Indian writers for taking on the challenge? Nor is it a shock that both Davidar and Vassanji live abroad — distance often allows writers to see their homes more clearly than those still living there. The real surprise is that there are still people who moan that books about India written by expatriates and émigrés are less important or less genuinely Indian. India is a nation of diaspora, and Indians are masters at adapting to new environments while remaining passionately attached to their own culture, no matter where they are. In an age of globalization, it seems perfectly natural that their books continue to be written from all corners of the earth.